Political Correctness Has Run Amok
Political correctness has gotten out of hand. There are people out there who are so sensitive that their feelings cannot handle the facts, and it’s getting worse. Of particular relevance, there are people out there who are performatively offended about calling a concentration camp a concentration camp. The notion that using the term “concentration camp” to describe a concentration camp offends the people who support concentration camps, and that the rest of us should be more careful with our language when criticizing concentration camps is just plain wrong.
There is an all-too-common misperception that the problem with political correctness is that a bunch of scary college women with uneven technicolor haircuts are out there forcing real gamer boys to not use racial slurs. The real problem, is, was, and will always be conservatives being destructive cry-bullies about everything whether it’s going their way or not.
Very recently, Liz Cheney got upset at Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for telling it like it is, and describing the current presidential regime’s concentration camps as what they are, which is concentration camps. Somehow, calling a concentration camp a concentration camp is more offensive than the existence of concentration camps to some people. There are plenty of historians who will tell you that, yeah, these are concentration camps, but why let something like facts get in the way of the right-wing agenda of doing horrible things and then getting offended if people don’t sufficiently flatter them while discussing their horrid actions?
Border Patrol Chief Carla Provost has this to say about the correct characterization of the concentration camps she’s running: “I personally find them offensive,”, which is frankly an absurd thing to say when you run concentration camps. I’m pretty sure Irma Grese would’ve been offended if you told her she worked at a concentration camp too, but she was held accountable for her crimes against humanity before anyone could ask her about it.
To provide some context to how the discussion of concentration camps turned into a bunch of reactionary dinguses centering their hurt feelings over concentration camps being referred to as concentration camps, let’s take a quick, meandering look back at some other instances of conservatives demanding uniformity of thought over the last hundred or so years.
Speaking of the Cheneys, one of my earliest experiences with the right’s inability to allow dissent was the manufactured consent and utter madness in the lead-up to the Iraq War. It’s hard to discuss Liz Cheney without bringing up her creepy cyborg dad, so let’s discuss a piece of his legacy of carnage and calamity. In order to sell the Iraq War to the masses, the discourse surrounding the war had to be tightly controlled. This was achieved, among other ways, by censoring anti-war voices in the media.
Jesse Ventura’s politics are uniquely American, in that he’s guided by an ever-spinning kaleidoscope of unconnected opinions rather than some kind of unifying set of ideals. A very fitting set of policy positions for a protest candidate, one supposes. Once in a while he’ll be clearly correct about stuff, like war and torture being bad. His show on MSNBC, “Jesse Ventura’s America”, was axed in 2003. While the network says it was due to production costs, Jesse “The Body” Ventura has alleged for years that it was because he didn’t support the war. While Mr. Ventura is probably the silliest person censored for their lack of support for the Iraq War, he’s hardly the only person whose career got hit with a chair for speaking out.
Ashleigh Banfield is a lesser-known victim of the witch-hunt against anti-war voices, but her story is particularly chilling. She stumbled her way into covering 9/11 as it happened by the coincidence of being nearby when the towers fell, and received a field promotion for her work of keeping a straight face as a huge storm of dust and death swirled around her. She became a network darling, doing the shows A Region in Conflict and Ashleigh Banfield: On Location for MSNBC soon-after. In April of 2003, Banfield gave a lecture in the Landon Lecture Series at Kansas State University where she gave a speech excoriating the sanitized coverage of the war, and for the grave moral crime of speaking out of turn, she was instantly demoted and stuffed into a closet because she angered the suits.
Phil Donahue, not to be confused with the loathsome toad Bill Donohue, was an elder statesman of the commentariat in 2003. Phil had some of the highest ratings on MSNBC when he made the mistake of giving a platform and a fair hearing for anti-war voices, and then suddenly he didn’t have a show anymore. Leaks from the network around the time paint a pretty grim picture of management firing him for an opinion that interfered with their mandate. What happened to Phil Donahue is more complicated and a topic deserving a lot more depth than I’m giving it here, but being a venerable old-head won’t save you from the right-wing censorship machine when it comes after you.
These are hardly the only cases of the right-wing stacking the deck of the Iraq War discourse at the time, but as examples these three paint a very clear picture that the pro-war stance had to be enforced. Megan McArdle (under her pseudonym “Jane Galt”) can call for lethal violence against anti-war protesters and still show her face in public. She values free speech, allegedly, unless it’s in opposition to a war she has a crush on. That sort of free speech should get hit by a big club in a pre-emptive manner, apparently.
For completeness, let’s briefly discuss a perfect example of the other side of the “my career was impacted by my Iraq War coverage” coin, Brian Williams. As some of you may remember, Brian Williams got sent to the doghouse by NBC for embellishing a story about his Iraq coverage. Williams has, as of this writing, never been punished for cheerleading a war while his network was owned by a defense contractor, General Electric, who profited handsomely from that war. Brian Williams at no point disclosed this conflict of interest to his viewers, flying in the face of even the most basic standard of journalistic ethics.
The margin of error for being wrong about the Iraq War currently sits at over five hundred thousand human deaths, but nobody who was wrong about the war has yet to face professional consequences for cheerleading mass murder. That’s one hell of a mulligan.
Around the same time, the Dixie Chicks had their careers destroyed for saying they were ashamed that George W. Bush is from Texas. It does confirm a lot of the prejudices the rest of us have about country music fans that they were ready to burn the Dixie Chicks at the stake for having the temerity to speak out of turn about George W. Bush being bad. It was a very ugly, prolonged display of chud pettiness, but on the bright side “Not Ready to Make Nice” still slaps. There are worse ways to have your career ruined than to get a whole bunch of awards for doubling down.
The flag-waving, war-pimping antics of a lot of other country music artists at the time remain unpunished to this day, despite their efforts producing nothing of artistic value, and being the soundtrack to mass murder. It’s hard to expect anything from the same crowd who got so offended by the concept that France exists that they tried to rename French Fries to “Freedom Fries” to spite those perfidious, potato-shilling Gauls. If the fries are so free, why am I still being charged money for them, huh? Yeah, that’s what I thought.
Let’s look a little further back, to the era of New Coke and New Romantics, the 1980’s. I’m a bit too young to remember Lorraine Williams’ reign of terror, but the 1980’s were a dark time for fans of Gary Gygax’s seminal polearm trivia game, Dungeons & Dragons. A bunch of suburban busybodies with nothing better to do decided that Dungeons & Dragons was bad because of an anecdotal observation that a young man who tragically died by suicide had touched some polyhedral dice once.
On the topic of Dungeons & Dragons, forces of reaction did what they always do and decided that a game created by a devout Christian in which demons and devils are depicted as evil has to be bad for…reasons? This game was carefully designed to lure children towards the treacherous path of boning up their math skills via the siren-call of elf-babes and monster-punching. Clearly this was a moral problem requiring the attention of activists and religious authority figures. The children of America haven’t faced something this foul since then, except the depraved plot of those mountebanks who made Hooked on Phonics to trick children into literacy. It takes a special kind of Christian outrage to accuse a game where devils and demons are evil punching bags of having some kind of pro-devil agenda.
All of this huffing and puffing and that one TV movie where Tom Hanks takes LARPing way too seriously lead to TSR Games’ bumbling then-CEO Lorraine Williams to scrub away “anti-Christian” content from the gameline, which more or less amounted to devils and demons being called “Baazetu” and “Tanar’ri” respectively in 2e. While it’s hardly the worst thing she did, this kind of loopy nonsense and pressure from right-wing activists nearly destroyed Dungeons & Dragons back in the day. Instead of play-testing the product, working around the paranoid delusions of people who aren’t even playing the game was a higher priority.
The whole thing was a piece of the larger Satanic Panic at the time, which was equally if not even more stupid than the buzzkills who were bothered about Dungeons & Dragons.
Luckily, everything’s been pretty smooth for Dungeons & Dragons since Lorraine Williams sold TSR Games off to Wizards of the Coast in 1996 and stopped being involved. The 5th edition of the game clarified that you can play gay characters if you want to in the rules. What should be an obvious and anodyne clarification of the game’s rules-as-intended since 1974 regarding character creation…offended the same assholes all over again.
Dr. Fredric Wertham was a pop-psychiatrist back in the 1950’s. He wrote a book, Seduction of the Innocent, which alleges that comic books are full of subversive content and turning children into a bunch of masturbating delinquents. Dr. Wertham raised a big stink and this big mess escalated all the way up to congressional hearings.
To pre-empt legislation, publishers established the Comics Code Authority to censor their books before the government could. The CCA prohibited scandalous content such as inter-racial relationships, werewolves, and any storytelling critical of law enforcement. Looking at the Comics Code Authority’s guidelines, it’s a conservative wet dream of stuff they think should be censored. No vampires, no cliffhangers, no chesty ladies, no drugs, no swear words…one could go on all day about all the things the CCA wouldn’t allow to be printed in comic books, but the Comics Code Authority banned pretty much everything fun.
In a grand display of Dr. Wertham’s characteristic concern for the well-being of children, back in the 1930’s, Dr. Wertham was a defense expert in the trial and sentencing of Albert Fish, who was a serial killer who ate and raped kids. An actual predator who eats children apparently required Dr. Wertham to take a paycheck dismissing his evil as mere insanity, but those damned comic books are a blight on the well-being of children.
The Comics Code Authority is hardly the first time conservative meddling stifled the creativity of hard-working American artists. In a similar act of cowardice to the later creation of the Comics Code Authority, Hollywood wriggled its way out of being censored by the state by creating its own censorship board to appease reactionary busybodies. The Hays Code was “voluntarily” adopted in 1930 and ruining art at full-tilt by 1934.
The Hays Code didn’t so much protect the public from indecency as it did protect films from being good. Many productions were forced to change things to comply with a conservative agenda.
What happened to Betty Boop? She didn’t comply with the Hays Code. Red Hot Riding Hood? Censored for domestic audiences for Hays Code violations. Why do married people always sleep in separate beds in old movies? Hays Code. Classic French-literature villain Cardinal Richelieu becoming “Prime Minister Richelieu” in 1948’s The Three Musketeers? Hays Code couldn’t abide the negative depiction of Christian clergy. Why didn’t Anna May Wong get the lead in The Good Earth? Hays Code didn’t like inter-racial romances being depicted on-screen and the leading-man role had already been cast as noted white dude Paul Muni. Why do so few films of the era even talk about poverty? Studios didn’t wanna brush up against the Hays Code. Why is the childbirth scene in Gone with the Wind depicted in silhouette? Hays Code didn’t allow for the consequences of sexual activity to be directly depicted.
If you’re wondering why it’s so hard to get, say, gay representation in blockbusters nowadays, it’s because the dastardly douchebags behind the Hays Code still exist, they’re just called the Motion Picture Association of America now, instead of being called the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America like they were back then.
Going even farther back to steampunk times, one eventually has to discuss the man who gave comstockery its name, Anthony Comstock. Anthony Comstock was a dangerously effective neurotic who had a zeal for censorship. Under his stewardship, the United States government would go through the mail to make sure nobody sent anything to anybody that Comstock didn’t like. Comstock’s efforts made it a dirty, dirty crime to send information about sex toys, condoms, and many other wonders we take for granted today through the mail. Comstock believed people were driven to brothels by naughty books, rather than the more obvious reason that there were sex workers there.
Among his many efforts to destroy free speech, Comstock repeatedly censored Emma “America’s Sweetheart” Goldman’s efforts to spread information about contraception and women’s health, presumably because Comstock was just afraid of labias or something. Comstock’s delusions were so totalizing and hostile to American life that he didn’t want information about how to prevent the spread of venereal diseases to get around, lest people be encouraged to…not get syphilis.
Comstock had over fifteen tons of books destroyed in his various campaigns against obscenity and fun, and if destroying books isn’t censorship, what is?
One would hope that comstockery died along with Comstock, but his legacy of being a censorious prick lives on in the hearts of everyone who insists that a concentration camp isn’t a concentration camp because the term “concentration camp” is more offensive to their delicate sensibilities than the tragedy being done to innocent people. How much more damage do these assholes have to do before we stop caring about whether or not they’re offended?
